Doing business with Castro’s Cuba

Doing Business With Castro’s Cuba

Statement from The Center for a Free Cuba:

The Castro regime, facing an acute financial crisis and the possible risk of losing the Venezuelan money lifeline, is trying to woo foreign investors, including some Cuban-American businessmen. It has launched this charm offensive without a true opening, while arresting, beating and harassing hundreds of Cuban peaceful pro-democracy activists.

The Castro brothers’ search for business deals is not new. In fact they actively pursued them in the 1990s, when the Soviet subsidies ended. But many of the foreign investors who were lured have left the island with a bitter after-taste. Of the 400 foreign companies then operating in Cuba, there are now only 190 left. Among the problems they encountered: having to partner, on a minority basis, mostly with army-controlled organizations; hiring employees only through state agencies, which pay the workers five percent of the dollar salaries in local currency; government freezing of hard-currency bank deposits; arrests without due process; outright seizure of businesses without recourse.

A year and a half ago, when it was learned that several Cuban-American businessmen were advocating the lifting of U.S. restrictions in order to strike deals with the Castro regime, a dissenting group of a dozen former Fortune 500 senior executives and other multinational business leaders issued a joint statement, Commitment to Freedom. The group was led by the late Manuel J. Cutillas, Chairman of the Center for a Free Cuba, philanthropist, civic leader, and for many years Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Bacardi Company.

The corporate leaders denounced “the Castro regime’s deceptive campaign aimed at securing much-needed financial resources to prolong its iron grip over the people of Cuba.” They further stated that “instead of ushering in a true economic and political opening that would unleash the entrepreneurial skills of the Cuban people and attract foreign capital, it has only introduced non-systemic, heavily-taxed, revocable reforms with no legal protection or investment return.”

The regime, they added, “is trying to induce the U.S. to lift or further weaken the embargo to funnel tourist dollars and bank credits to the bankrupt island–a bailout under the guise of constructive engagement.”

Finally, the group of prominent Cuban-American executives asserted that “the future of the island-nation lies not with the current failed, octogenarian rulers, but with the leaders of the growing pro-democracy movement. They, and not their oppressors, are worthy of receiving international recognition, financial resources and communications technology to carry out their heroic struggle.”